Ben Heilveil, MA, LMFT

I came to this work through conversation and through silence — two practices that, at their best, share the same quality of attention. I spent time studying what happens when people attend carefully to something together, and separately, sitting with what arises when one stops filling the space. Both of those experiences — the slow collaborative inquiry, and the willingness to stay with what's uncomfortable and not immediately resolve it — shaped how I understand what therapy can be.

My clinical work has focused on couples and families, creative individuals, people navigating complex relational dynamics, and those working in high-pressure or high-visibility fields. I have extensive experience with crisis intervention, trauma, and working with communities that have historically been underserved or misunderstood in clinical settings.

I trained at Pacifica Graduate Institute in depth psychology and have been practicing for fifteen years across a wide range of settings — community mental health, high-acuity residential care, crisis work, and private practice. I served as Associate Professor and Core Faculty at Pacifica, teaching courses in ecotherapy, community mental health, and clinical practice. My clinical orientation is relational and psychoanalytic, with a particular interest in how the space between people — the relational field — becomes the medium through which change actually happens. 

Those years working with people who had limited access to care matter to how I think about what therapy is actually for. It isn't self-optimization; it is creating pathways toward self-knowing and wholeness. I maintain a commitment to pro bono and reduced-fee work with vulnerable communities, including those navigating poverty, immigration, and systemic inequity. That work and my private practice inform each other in ways I value.

I am an EAGALA-certified equine therapist and co-founded California Woodland Institute with my wife Ashley, which offers equine-assisted therapy, therapist trainings, and ranch-based clinical work in Upper Ojai. 

I live on a ranch in Upper Ojai with Ashley and our two daughters. I'm a reader, a rancher, and someone who takes the interior life seriously, not as a project, but as the place where most of what matters actually happens.